GSKILL Extreme Series (HZ) DDR I PC4000 Dual Channel Review

GSKILL?s foray into the Western overclocking community was explosive. While their early modules were ergonomically challenged; without heatspreader and barren, they packed quite a performance punch. Today we test the Extreme Performance PC4000 in 2048MB Dual Channel kit form.

Intro/Test system

GSKILL has labored to elevate themselves to the upper echelons of high performance SDRAM suppliers. Although a relative newcomer to the overclocking community, GSKILL has let their product do the talking for them and it's been quite the conversationalist. One of the earliest products reviewed here was GSKILL PC4800/PC3200 512MB kit. The memory performed as advertised and was the first product allowing me to reach a 300FSB. It's flexibility was ideal for the budding overclocker, offering the tightest timings available at DDR400 (2-2-2-5) and scaling to DDR600 running CL3-4-4-8. While the overclocking sector has probably grown ten-fold in the last few years, producing memory for what is primarily a niche market is no easy task. GSKILL does make memory for all applications; however, they continue their commitment to produce the fastest speed grades as IC's become available.

Under the HoodI do not recommend opening or removing your heatspreaders, as this clearly violates the warranty, and can easily damage the memory. I wanted to identify these ICs for our readers and decided to take the risk. While the double sided tape shown cannot compete with thermal epoxy for heat transfer, it's a marked improvement over some thermal tape I’ve seen, which seems to act as insulators. GSKILL HZ series in 2048MB kit size spec' Samsung K4H510838C-UCCC ICs in 64Mx8 double sided. While they do not have the overclocking headroom of other Samsung parts, given the topology and the fact these are native DDR400 ICs, they do quite well.

Test methodologyGSKILL will be tested against two other brands of memory; Corsair TwinX2048-4000PT (CL3-4-4-8) 2x1024MB kit and Mushkin XP4400 (CL2.5-4-4-8) 2x512MB kit. Each memory, except for the Mushkin, will run using Serial Presence Detect (SPD or Auto in BIOS), since this setting is most commonly used among the average Desktop PC user. As overclockers, we must remember we represent a minority among PC-users, and as such, should be mindful of our propensity to tweak the BIOS. To represent or assist the largest number of PC-users, each 2048MB kit will be run under SPD (Auto in the BIOS) while testing at DDR400 and DDR500 speeds. Mushkin features SPD timings of 2.5-4-4-8, therefore this kit was manually adjusted to run at 3-4-4-8 for all tests. Above DDR500 each memory will run at 3-4-4-8.

Thumbnails below exemplify GSKILL FSB/memory ratios for each speed tested throughout this review.